Send Admin Email Notification When New Users Sign Up

Hi Bill,
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. However,currently, we do not support to send alerts to email when new users sign-up. We deeply apologize for this inconvenience. Btw, if you want to get  this feature, we can help you do that via custom work which incurs additional cost.
Have a great day ahead!
Vinny.

Excuse me, Vinny, but in my view, this is a very basic Admin function which should ALREADY be implenented in phpFox. Something as essential as this should NOT require custom work.

Bill,

If your email service provider has webhooks you could set it up using the subject line.  When a new user signs up it sends the a standard email and the subject line might be something like this.

Please verify your email for: your site

use a webhook to say any time your email service see a subject line like that send a copy to a special email which I had on my phone that was only used for that.  It could be a free gmail since you will never use it to send anythinig and only use it to notified you of a new user.

I am unable to give you an example now since my current free version mail service now does not have webhooks anymore...everyone wants money :)

Thanks John. I will look into it. I think you and I are on the same wavelength when it comes to vampiric blood suckers. 🤪

Hey Bill,

do you find a solution for your topic? That would also be interssting for me. ?

Oliver, sadly, even though a full year has gone by since I first made this simple request, the phpFox staff has NOT implemented this basic Admin email function. Why not? Because as others here will attest, phpFox's modus operandi has long been to pressure phpFox users to spend money on custom work.

As I said above, in my view, there are a number of features which should be built into the phpFox default package, but they are not implemented. These are basic functions and features which you will find in other similar software.

For the record, over the past two years since I first purchased phpFox, I have made a number of feature requests. The answer from the phpFox staff has always been the same: "We will think about it. Maybe we will add that feature in the future." Well, to date, they have not implemented one single one of my feature requests. It is always "You can pay for custom work to get it."

To get my iOS and Android apps updated, it is the same thing. After three free upgrades, it is more money, money, money, plus more money to add a bit of customization to my apps. This is one of the main reasons why I will not be upgrading to phpFox 5. I am tired of the constant money scam. I am a poor man, and I just can't afford to keep paying for this.

It's been a while and I've long since torn it all down, but I seem to remember doing this on my v3 site many, many moons ago...?

However, that's not all that helpful...

If you drop the following in your php.ini:
mail.log = /var/log/apache2/phpMail.log
then you can have a script watch the logfile and notify you when registration mail goes out via PHPmail functions.
By logging from the PHPmail stuff, you should catch it even if you use mailchimp, sendgrid or even local system mail delivery (sendmail/postfix). Most Linux systems already have logwatch or logcheck and both can easily do regexp pattern matching, and notifications via system mail daemon. I know services like data dog and new relic can do this somewhat as well if you have the system agent running.
If you use the system mail daemon for delivery and have a modern linux system, rsyslog already has a capability to do all of this and notify you also via SMTP (child's play to send to SMS addresses). You would have to force it to watch your PHPmail log output, but it would probably work if you know how rsyslog works.

It's a kinda long way around and you very well may end up getting a whole lot more notifications that you could find helpful. Depends on the site, registrations, and UCE/spam volume... but you could do this, if you choose.

 

JohnJr and t3ln3t, while I appreciate you both taking the time to offer these suggestions, the real point that I am trying to make here is that we should NOT even have to resort to such roundabout methods in order to receive email notifications when a new user signs up.

Look, if the phpFox software can automatically send an email address verification notification to a new user when they sign up, then it most certainly can send an email to the site admin when a new user signs up as well.

My gosh, scripts of various types -- such as javascript, perl, php, etc. -- have been able to perform this simple email notification function for literally decades now.

For the record, I am an old school, pre-Internet guy who used to run both a BBS, as well as an old school messageboard. Even my messageboard cgi  -- which I still run for the heck of it -- can automatically send out automated email notifications.

So the larger question in my mind is WHY phpFox can't perform this same basic function which has been available for many years.

If you are a longtime phpFox admin, you will already know the answer to this question. Do I really need to spell it out for you?

Bill,

I may have been able to find the code and slap an if statement in there to send the admin an email, but most site owners end up getting an email service to handle all the emails which cost money for every 1000 emails sent.  So because I didn't want to incur the extra cost of emailing me each time a user signs up, I thought the easy way was to use a webhook to get around that additional cost.